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I had about 15-20 students that had to stay in during part of their P.E. time this morning because they didn’t bring back their signed graded papers. Sooo-I had them go through the Scott Foresman Reading Street textbook and write down their favorite stories and give the reasons why. These are the results for the weekly stories(the loooong ones) and the short stories (that come after the loooong ones):

Interpretation of Results-Fiction (8)/Non-fiction (3). Obviously, the students like fiction more than non-fiction soooo-next year I am going to make sure that when we read non-fiction I will choose a couple of the above and then find some high-interest articles, magazines, etc. for the rest. I know that I need to teach them how to read and understand non-fiction, but I want it to be as enjoyable as possible for them (AND ME)!! 🙂

Short StoryVotes

Coming Over 7

A Dog’s Life 5

Eating Utensils 4

Call of the Deep Wilds, Song of Chirimia, They’ve Got Personality, Going Ape, and Wild Peco’s Bill all received 3 votes.

OVERALL: I had A LOT of students say they liked certain stories because they like animals! And look at how many chose “Coming Over” which is about immigration. They liked this story-this sort of surprised me! 🙂 I think that I will make sure immigration is a topic that we read about more than once.

We have been working on summarizing and determining importance this week. Yesterday I showed them how to make an outline to take notes. I explained to them that this will help them in history and science and generally anything that may be difficult to read and understand. We have been practicing these skills with our story this week-“Ancient Greece” in the Scott Foresman Reading Street series. It is a non-fiction story that is PACKED with facts and information! 🙂

Determining importance is HARD for them to grasp. They understand what it means, but it’s hard for them to pick out the important things in some paragraphs and sections. I don’t think I worked on this with them this year like I should have-so I will definitely focus on this next year! 🙂

When we were working on the outline I had them work in several different ways:

1. I read some paragraphs out loud and we figured it out together

2. I had them work in groups

3. I had them work with a partner

4. I had them read silently and then we pulled out the important stuff together

We broke this story down CHUNK-BY-CHUNK-BY-CHUNK!!! 🙂

We will see if it helped them any when they take the open book test tomorrow that I am going to create tonight! 🙂 (Nothing like procrastinating)

Here are some posters that help with nonfiction reading- this is a link to MITEACHINGBLOG-this is not “my” teaching blog. This is another teacher and I can’t seem to find her name on her blog, but she has some good ideas and these posters are wonderful for teaching students “how” to read nonfiction text.

About Me

I teach 6th grade reading/language arts, and we currently use the Scott Foresman Reading Street series. Teaching is my passion!!! I am hoping to create lots of resources that can be used to supplement this reading series. Please be patient.